First Day at School in Mississippi Won't be Forgotten

photo by U.S. Army Garrison Casey / flickr

"Children finished their first day of school with no parents to go home to tonight. Babies and toddlers remained in daycare with no guardian to pick them up. A child vainly searched a workplace parking lot for missing parents."--Ashton Pittman. Jackson Free Press


Do you remember your first day of school? Scary and not quite knowing what to expect. The big kids in the neighborhood told stories that kept you awake at night. Mean teachers. A whipping machine in the Principal's office. Shots sometime in the fall for vaccinations. Teachers wouldn't let you go to the bathroom. The first grade teachers, they said were the worst. Why they'd kick you out for chewing gum, for whispering to someone across the aisle. Just about anything. 

But it wasn't all bad. Mama had taken us to town on the bus, went to the store we could afford and we got outfitted mighty fine. New shirts--cotton and checked. New pair of pants. Even new shoes. We had underwear and socks already. My mother opened her purse, took out the lay-away receipt, paid what she still owed. We got back on the bus and headed home.

Days before we had picked up some pencils and a Blue Horse notebook. This was the time without backpacks. But we did have a metal box that held paper and pencils and our tiny pencil sharpener and our lunch in a paper sack.  Even though we were scared we followed a long line of big kids up the street to the red-brick school. Scared but excited, wondering what this new chapter in our lives would mean. 

Back home we later found out that our parents, especially our Mamas cried a lot that day. Their babies were leaving the nest. They knew what we did not know. From now on things would be radically different in our little lives and theirs too. It would never be as it was.  

But this August--this starting of the school week in Mississippi another drama was played out.

photo by Zhang You / flickr

Without notice ICE officials descended in Morton,Mississippi and hauled away 680 Hispanic parents. Most of those arrested worked in food processing plants. It will be a long time before I forget that picture of that little girl sitting on the curb crying and saying,  " I want my Daddy. I want my Daddy." 

What happens to kids who feel abandoned by their parents? School officials said that for the next few days 50% of those children did not go to school. And if they did--how could they concentrate wondering where their parents were and what would happen to them.

This is our government in 2019. Cages and kids shipped off to God knows where some never able to see their parents again. What kind of traumas are we foisting on these children? And what is these terrible actions doing to the hearts of the people of our country. 

Where are we going folks? What do we do with these dreams we have had about a place called America where people could find safety and hope and a better life? T.S. Eliot year ago expressed our time well:

"A Cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the timekept City;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle should flourish own the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.'" (T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock)  

photo by Thomas Cizanskas / flickr

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com